Surviving Hal. Penny Flanagan

      For my parents:

      Dad, who leads by example, Mum, who never doubts.

      1.

      At the baggage carousel in Bangkok Airport the girl beside us spoke in an abrasive nasal drawl that physically repulsed me.

      “I’m goin’ straight to a bar an’ get pissed, it’s heaps cheap here, ay?”

      I nudged Andy. He ‘tched’ in unspoken empathy and my agitation abated somewhat. We were here together, just the two of us. We’d left our kids behind for the first time in ten years. We were free and easy; untethered and set adrift.

      I stayed close to Andy as he pushed our luggage-laden trolley down the concourse. Usually I am an independent sort of a woman, but here I felt some cloying need to grasp his arm and hold on for dear life. I was thirty-eight, he was not much older, but I imagined the two of us as an elderly couple, holding to each other in the face of a fast-moving and increasingly unfamiliar world.

      The terminal was a deceptive bubble of airconditioning. Every now and then a door shifted open and the real world blasted in; a fog of hot, putrid air from a city rotten with the spoils of urban excess.

      As we walked down the arrivals concourse there were eager crowds on either side of us. Everyone was expecting someone. We were expecting Tom.

      A familiar-looking Thai woman caught my eye. I was just thinking to myself, Gee that stout little Thai woman looks just like Hal’s wife, when her eyes widened with recognition and she started squawking,

      “Hal! Hal!”

      She was waving her finger in our direction, no doubt grasping for the English words to say, “Your estranged son is here! And his pasty, uptight wife!”

      Hal sprang out of the crowd like a demented jack-in-the-box. He seemed as surprised as us, then the realisation hit him; we were trying to slip into the country without him knowing. A resigned, ‘poor me’ look fell over his face. He thrust his hands into his pockets and hung his head morosely, the victim. I looked at Andy and could tell that it had started already. He felt torn between a deeply ingrained impulse to care for his father and, at the same time, to keep him at an arm’s length.

      Nostalgia won out. Andy’s face brightened with a smile, then his shoulders folded around his father in an embrace. A split second of father-son dynamic unspoiled by history.

      “Hey! Good to see you, you reeker.” Andy glossed over the betrayal with some family jargon.

      Hal directed Andy towards Phan, pushing them together for an embrace. “Say hello to your stepmum,” he said, and even I had to laugh.

      Andy gave her a kiss on the cheek and then everyone looked at me. I held up my hand in a ‘how’ gesture designed to keep everyone away from me. It worked for a while, then when I was distracted—sizing up the Thai woman lurking behind Phan and wondering who she was—Hal seized the moment, sidling up beside me and clamping his arm around me, claiming me as part of his farang clan in front of all these Thai nationals.

      At that point, both Andy and I were thinking the same thing; Tom had sent Hal for us instead of meeting us himself. What a dirty thing to do.

      It turned out Hal was there to meet his friends, Greg, Jean and Ivan, and take them all to Pattaya for a couple of days before the wedding. It was awkward. We hadn’t seen Hal for twelve months. Andy doesn’t exactly stay in regular contact.

      The odd flurry of disjointed sentences spat onto an email arrives in our inbox from Hal every couple of months. Usually he wants something like mail forwarded from his PO box, that sort of thing. The last series of communications, increasingly solicitous, were to procure a long, specific list of ‘essentials’ from Australia, Andy to bring them. I thought the Savlon cream was fair enough, the Bushells tea (‘no bags, leaves only’), the specialised toothpaste, Vegemite (‘tubes only, no jars’). But manila folders? Do they not have stationery in Thailand?

      We all stood around attempting conversation; awkward bursts of familiar sounding words that went nowhere. We tried to pretend it was normal that a son wouldn’t be in contact with his father regularly enough to prevent an entirely coincidental meeting at an international airport. I made small talk with Jean for a while. She seemed friendly enough. She had a crinkly smile and an honest face that I trusted. I wasn’t sure where Ivan fitted in but I assumed he was an old family friend. He was a short, stocky guy with a goatee and wrong-for-the-climate polyester pants. Andy said later, “Did you see his shiny pants? Weird.” And they weren’t just ‘travel pants’, either. He continued to wear them religiously over the next week or so, through the humidity and the stifling heat, in remote village and city alike.

      Now, I’m not just saying this because of what I know now, but there was something about him that unsettled me: he was the sort of man who locks eyes with you and stands too close.

      The woman loitering on the edges was Phan’s sister, Jeng, an identically stout woman all dolled up in lipstick and clicky heels. She was plaintive in both her expression and posture; hopeful and nervous but not entirely optimistic about whatever it was she was anticipating. She was introduced to me by Phan almost as an afterthought and met my eyes only momentarily; either I was of no consequence to her, or she had decided that she was of none to me. It was all hideously awkward.

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